Geometry Wars Beta

My Geometry Wars level is my try to make a level as similar as possible to one of the most epic arcade games ever: Geometry Wars Retro Evolved! It is a SINGLE PLAYER level, and it's logics won't let parties to play it.

Here's a video of the original game:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoK8sz3KuI0

And here are some pics of my level Geometry Wars - Beta v0.85

http://i1.lbp.me/img/ft/501bfc9c67f2...fe6323c192.jpg

http://i0.lbp.me/img/ft/d8067fd93543...e55436171c.jpg

http://if.lbp.me/img/ft/57fb1b9fdde5...a45b411da8.jpg

http://i9.lbp.me/img/ft/719d6893d0f2...f68643e041.jpg

http://i4.lbp.me/img/ft/1f44482a0b3a...f44a841c1d.jpg

http://i9.lbp.me/img/ft/f195b34cec66...113ffa5ffd.jpg

There is an achievements system. If you select Achievements in the Main Menu, you'll see the names of all the achievements. They are the original achievements of the original game. If you press X over one of the 12 achievements, a subtitle explaining how to obtain it will be displayed. There's 1 prize per achievement obtained successfully.

It is a HARD GAME, it requires serious twinstick shooting skills, having very good reflexes and thinking fast!

Advices for high scoring:

1- Survive!!!! Don't let enemies touch you. Be careful!!! They spawn in random places, they could spawn over you! - this also happened in the original game, so I'm not gonna change it. Pay attention! Score multipliers will be obtained for killing a lot of enemies without dying. If you die, you'll lose your multipliers.

2- Use bombs wisely! Bombs elliminate ALL the enemies, but they don't give points. Use them if you don't find a way to scape. If there's a chance to survive without them, seize the opportunity to save bombs.

3- When enemies surround you, get away shooting in the same direction you are moving to, to make way. If you reach 10.000 points, your weapon will be upgraded.

4- Try to get the achievement Pacifism. It's a good way to practice skills to dodge enemies. To obtain Pacifism, you must survive the first 60 seconds of the game without shooting and without using bombs! When you obtain it succesfully, you'll hear a "success noise", thus you'll know you did it, and then you can start shooting knowing that you made it!

I'm looking for skilled testers. Check out this link for more info.

I will probably enable F4F one day of these. If I do, it will probably be for advices about what kind of prizes would be better. For now, the prizes are objects used in the level to make it work.

http://lbp.me/v/8ph6xq

Ok, just incase you don't understand how F4F works (as implied by your first line :)), when someone leaves feedback for your level in your thread, you leave some in return in theirs... and visa versa.

First of all, I understand this is a beta, so I will give you a few ways I think you could improve the level:

1) Presentation - Outside the game arena it looks a little sloppy, especially with you using the blank level floor. I would suggest that you should try and implement a game menu. Also, the edges of the boarder (of the game arena) overlap in a couple of places so I think this should be tidied up.

2) Instead of having the ship rotate with the L stick, you should have it rotate with the R stick, therefore the ship points towards where it's supposed to be firing. I think this is how twin stick shooters normally are.

3) At one point, an enemy spawned right on me as soon as I spawned - perhaps this could be addressed.

Other than those points, you have the workings of a pretty good level. Naturally, I'm pretty rubbish at these types of games, so I'm not gonna mark you down based on my lack of ability :D

I think the music is also very good and fits in with the level pretty well.

In return, could you please play and leave feedback for my BattleSnake 3000 level (links to thread and lbp.me in my sig). Like yours, it is in an arcade style. Please don't be put off by the lack of plays :p

Thanks a lot for the feedback. I'll comment it some:

1- I thought about making a menu, but for now, my priority is to improve the game itself: enemies, multipliers and all logic stuff. I figure out that when you say "overlap" you're meaning that the borderlines go out from the corner. I'll check it out (please correct me if I figured it out bad)

2- Normally Twinstick shooters are that way, but the original Geometry Wars Retro Evolved (the game I'm trying to emulate) didn't do so.

3- Actually, the enemy blinks for 0.5 seconds before "materializing" to say it somehow. Sometimes it can be hard to see. There may be some undetected bugs also, but I do exhaustive beta-testing regularly to find them all. This thing happened often in the original game, but the blink was much more visible. Anyway, if thermo let me, I'll consider to fix it somehow. Notice that I try to make it as similar as the original one.

I'm glad you liked it.

About the music, I made a sequencer as similar as possible to the original GW: RE OST. It was hard with the LBP2 instruments (they are not as cool as the original instruments), but I could figure out the score just listening to the OST.

I'm not thinking on including the worms. I was thinking on including "gravity red circles", but thermo is really small and the emulation of red circle's original scoring system is too heavy and consumes a lot of thermo :/. If Mm made an "a.nalogic score scale" input action for the Score Giver, I could include it np, but without it, it consumes too much thermo. But who knows? Maybe I'll make the worms. For now I want to improve logic's stuff.

I've checked out your Battlesnake 3000 and gave you feedback.

One more thing: lack of plays means NOTHING! I've seen a lot of supposed "cool levels" played thousands of times and most of them just SUCK! I'm sure your level deserves much more plays and hearts than most of them all together do.

Thanks a lot for reading this ^^. I really appreciate your review.

1) Yeah, that's exactly what I meant by "overlap". If you're having trouble matching the sides up, just make sure you put either a small, medium or large grid on, and just count the number of squares. If you want help making a menu, comphermc and ScorpSkull have great tutorials, with the latter having a menu showcase level that you can copy to your moon. That's what I did. I didn't copy his logic exactly, I made my own changes here and there.

2) Oh, I didn't know it was based on another game. Perhaps you could add that starr background like in the real game?

Perhaps I could add the star background. The v0.84 that I'm currently developing have got the overlaps already fixed. I've also fixed some bugs that enemy spawning CPU had, but still want to do somemore modifications before updating the beta.

Thanks for tutorials info, but I guess I won't need it. I don't think making a menu will be too hard. It's just that I've got more important priorities right now. But I'll make one someday that's sure.